Recently, there has been much ado about the constitutional guarantee of the elected representatives of the people from freedom of executive branch harassment.
New Hampshire, like many other states, has three contemporaneous branches of government. Under the New Hampshire Constitution, those branches are not co-equal; they are only cooperative.
The governor (executive) of New Hampshire has, in effect, exactly one “power.” That is the power of veto. Other actions of the governor must be ratified by the governor’s council or approved by the General Court (also known as the Legislature). The judiciary is limited by the constitution in its scope of power to ruling only on the cases before it.
All other power, the power to tax, to make laws, the exclusive power to suspend laws and the power to disburse money lies in the General Court (the House and the Senate). Even the name of the legislative body in New Hampshire evokes a superior status of the three supportive branches, i.e., the General Court.
The New Hampshire Constitution begins with the phrase that “all government of right originates from the people.”
The representatives and senators are defined as the surrogates of the people.
The executive and judicial branches are specifically barred from interfering with the legislative actions of the surrogates of the people so as to prevent intimidation and coercion by force (badge or gun).
That is the only thing that prevents the executive branch (of which all police agencies are part) from running roughshod over the people (through their elected representatives).
This does not mean that legislators are above the law. Indeed all the executive branch (police) need do is mail a ticket (a summons or mesne process) to the suspected offender, which is routine and common practice – even taught at the police academy, I understand.
However, neither the police nor a court of any kind may interfere with a legislator while that legislator is acting as the representative of the people, the source of all governmental power in New Hampshire.
If the alternative were the case, nothing would prevent the executive from riding roughshod over the people.
The legislative privilege granted in Part the Second, Article 27, is not for the legislator, it is to protect the people, through their elected representatives, from being coerced by the executive.
State Rep. Jordan Ulery R-Hudson
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
What $100 a year buys, contemporaneously
Letter published in the Apr. 10, 2007 edition of the Nashua Telegraph, concerning the state representative recently charged with speeding while en route to the State House:
Monday, April 09, 2007
Big House, Bleak House
As a prelude to the contemplation of the ugliest building in New Hampshire, consider two observations made by the psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, his celebrated first-person account of life as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps.
“The best of us did not return,” Frankl confessed. “On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who . . . had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends in order to save themselves.”
But, Frankl recalled, those who did manage to endure the unspeakable horrors “experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.” He described a fellow prisoner running into his barracks to implore his dead-tired comrades to run outside and gaze at the sunset through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods – “the same woods,” Frankl dryly notes, “in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant.”
“Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, with the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’”
How much could the immediate neighbors of this camp have known of any of this? Similarly, the ugliest building in New Hampshire is actually a complex of structures that, to judge from comments made on a recent tour for participants in the Leadership New Hampshire program, surprises visitors by its very existence. “Gee,” went one typical remark. “I never had any idea that all of this was back here.”
But 1,400 people live there, on North Main Street in Concord. At that address has stood, since 1880, the New Hampshire State Prison, now known as the New Hampshire State Prison for Men.
Nobody would equate those 1,400 inmates with Frankl and his fellow holocaust victims. The rule of law, not hatred and genocide, determines who is sent to the State Prison. Conditions there are humane. But if one accepts, as Frankl did, that one had to be immoral to survive in a concentration camp, then it follows that all inmates should be permitted the occasional glimpse of beauty despite their failings.
The State Prison has been designed expressly to make it very difficult for that to happen.
From the street, the State Prison retains a certain solemn beauty typical of 19th century lockups, from an era in which prisons were frequently labeled “penetentiaries” – places where the penitent could sit in solitude and contemplate their crime. The sharply hipped roof, the stolid brickwork, the big arched windows of a solemn, deliberately awe inspiring sort -- all of this testifies to a Victorian design sensibility calculated to make a statement about the majesty of the state.
Today those big windows have been largely bricked in, the glass openings reduced to slits. It’s a good metaphor for what’s inside – all the result of a bonanza of prison construction in the 80s and 90s. According to the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies, driving that bonanza was a staggering 600 percent increase in New Hampshire’s prison population since 1981, while New Hampshire’s overall population grew by only 35.5 percent.
What were once the massive cell blocks behind those big windows is now space devoted to the prison infirmary, classrooms, offices and other support services. The living spaces themselves have been moved to the rear of a vastly expanded prison yard, so they are invisible to those outside the walls.
At the north end of the yard is the Hancock Building, a housing unit that resembles, and is, a hastily constructed warehouse. The rest of the living units are fan-shaped and jammed together in a zig-zag pattern that is only apparent from above.
The windowless “chow house,” where food is served to those inmates allowed to leave their cells to eat, is at the heart of this agglomeration. Dominating it visually, as one approaches it from the yard, is a huge series of wide outdoor ramps designed to provide accessibility to the eating facility.
Architecture always communicates. The message here seems to be that, where once we built prisons to evoke penitence and remorse in the face of stern justice, now all we care about is getting prisoners in and out without being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A few feet away are inmates who lack the privilege to use this ramp because they are so violent they have earned a spot in the super-max unit. The architectural aphorism “form follows function” does not apply here, given that these inmates remain in locked in their cells 23 hours a day, unless the purpose truly is the kind of sensory deprivation that leads to madness. The corridors are gloomy, designed so that the door of each cell overlooks nothing.
Cell windows are likewise tiny and open to small, barren, concrete-walled courtyards formed by the hub-and-spoke arrangement of this bunker-like structure. Inmates spend that precious one-hour of outside time either in such a lifeless outdoor zone or in similarly claustrophobic and featureless dayrooms.
The New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies has identified two reasons for the explosion in New Hampshire’s prison population. “What is not driving the growth in the state prison population is any apparent growth in serious crimes in New Hampshire,” according to a 2004 report. Rather, the Legislature increased criminal penalties in 1982 and, more significantly, the corrections department and the parole board have opted to throw vastly more probation violators back in prison.
In other words, New Hampshire has over the last quarter century knowingly opted to keep criminals incarcerated longer and in conditions that are deliberately dehumanizing. This springs to mind upon noticing the frieze of colored tiles above the entry portal of the general population living unit adjacent to the super-max, designed to evoke mountains. It is the only thing in sight that was deliberately installed for aesthetic reasons – the only possible chance for inmates, behind their tall concrete walls, to visualize how beautiful the world could be.
Unlike the Nazis, who planned to work Viktor Frankl to death, New Hampshire expects to release almost every inmate in the State Prison eventually. What is the cost to society, let alone the sanity of the individual inmates, if every moment of every day in prison is a deliberate immersion in boundless and unrelenting ugliness?
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“The best of us did not return,” Frankl confessed. “On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who . . . had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends in order to save themselves.”
But, Frankl recalled, those who did manage to endure the unspeakable horrors “experienced the beauty of art and nature as never before.” He described a fellow prisoner running into his barracks to implore his dead-tired comrades to run outside and gaze at the sunset through the tall trees of the Bavarian woods – “the same woods,” Frankl dryly notes, “in which we had built an enormous, hidden munitions plant.”
“Standing outside we saw sinister clouds glowing in the west and the whole sky alive with clouds of ever-changing shapes and colors, from steel blue to blood red. The desolate grey mud huts provided a sharp contrast, with the puddles on the muddy ground reflected the glowing sky. Then, after minutes of moving silence, one prisoner said to another, ‘How beautiful the world could be!’”
How much could the immediate neighbors of this camp have known of any of this? Similarly, the ugliest building in New Hampshire is actually a complex of structures that, to judge from comments made on a recent tour for participants in the Leadership New Hampshire program, surprises visitors by its very existence. “Gee,” went one typical remark. “I never had any idea that all of this was back here.”
But 1,400 people live there, on North Main Street in Concord. At that address has stood, since 1880, the New Hampshire State Prison, now known as the New Hampshire State Prison for Men.
Nobody would equate those 1,400 inmates with Frankl and his fellow holocaust victims. The rule of law, not hatred and genocide, determines who is sent to the State Prison. Conditions there are humane. But if one accepts, as Frankl did, that one had to be immoral to survive in a concentration camp, then it follows that all inmates should be permitted the occasional glimpse of beauty despite their failings.
The State Prison has been designed expressly to make it very difficult for that to happen.
From the street, the State Prison retains a certain solemn beauty typical of 19th century lockups, from an era in which prisons were frequently labeled “penetentiaries” – places where the penitent could sit in solitude and contemplate their crime. The sharply hipped roof, the stolid brickwork, the big arched windows of a solemn, deliberately awe inspiring sort -- all of this testifies to a Victorian design sensibility calculated to make a statement about the majesty of the state.
Today those big windows have been largely bricked in, the glass openings reduced to slits. It’s a good metaphor for what’s inside – all the result of a bonanza of prison construction in the 80s and 90s. According to the New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies, driving that bonanza was a staggering 600 percent increase in New Hampshire’s prison population since 1981, while New Hampshire’s overall population grew by only 35.5 percent.
What were once the massive cell blocks behind those big windows is now space devoted to the prison infirmary, classrooms, offices and other support services. The living spaces themselves have been moved to the rear of a vastly expanded prison yard, so they are invisible to those outside the walls.
At the north end of the yard is the Hancock Building, a housing unit that resembles, and is, a hastily constructed warehouse. The rest of the living units are fan-shaped and jammed together in a zig-zag pattern that is only apparent from above.
The windowless “chow house,” where food is served to those inmates allowed to leave their cells to eat, is at the heart of this agglomeration. Dominating it visually, as one approaches it from the yard, is a huge series of wide outdoor ramps designed to provide accessibility to the eating facility.
Architecture always communicates. The message here seems to be that, where once we built prisons to evoke penitence and remorse in the face of stern justice, now all we care about is getting prisoners in and out without being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A few feet away are inmates who lack the privilege to use this ramp because they are so violent they have earned a spot in the super-max unit. The architectural aphorism “form follows function” does not apply here, given that these inmates remain in locked in their cells 23 hours a day, unless the purpose truly is the kind of sensory deprivation that leads to madness. The corridors are gloomy, designed so that the door of each cell overlooks nothing.
Cell windows are likewise tiny and open to small, barren, concrete-walled courtyards formed by the hub-and-spoke arrangement of this bunker-like structure. Inmates spend that precious one-hour of outside time either in such a lifeless outdoor zone or in similarly claustrophobic and featureless dayrooms.
The New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies has identified two reasons for the explosion in New Hampshire’s prison population. “What is not driving the growth in the state prison population is any apparent growth in serious crimes in New Hampshire,” according to a 2004 report. Rather, the Legislature increased criminal penalties in 1982 and, more significantly, the corrections department and the parole board have opted to throw vastly more probation violators back in prison.
In other words, New Hampshire has over the last quarter century knowingly opted to keep criminals incarcerated longer and in conditions that are deliberately dehumanizing. This springs to mind upon noticing the frieze of colored tiles above the entry portal of the general population living unit adjacent to the super-max, designed to evoke mountains. It is the only thing in sight that was deliberately installed for aesthetic reasons – the only possible chance for inmates, behind their tall concrete walls, to visualize how beautiful the world could be.
Unlike the Nazis, who planned to work Viktor Frankl to death, New Hampshire expects to release almost every inmate in the State Prison eventually. What is the cost to society, let alone the sanity of the individual inmates, if every moment of every day in prison is a deliberate immersion in boundless and unrelenting ugliness?
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Sunday, April 08, 2007
seat belts and civil liberties
The New Hampshire House of Representatives voted 153 to 140 on April 5 to cause New Hampshire to join the 49 other states that require adults as well as kids to use seat belts while in a moving car. The bill now goes to the New Hampshire Senate.
The account of this vote in the Valley News quoted one of the bill's opponents, Rep. Jason Bedrick (Republican of Londonderry) as saying: "We don't need a paternalistic Legislature coming in and telling adults what they can and cannot do."
Oh really?
Would you want that paternalistic Legislature to step in if hospitals decided to stop treating injuries caused by car accidents in which the patient was not wearing a seat belt? Or if your health insurance carrier decided not to cover the necessary health care in such circumstances?
And what about the paternalistic Legislature that has made drunk driving illegal? And murder, for that matter?
It is also worth noting how this opponent of paternalistic legislation voted a few weeks ago on the question of whether to REQUIRE parental notification when a pregnant teenage girl seeks an abortion. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston has declared the current notification statute unconsitutional because it lacked an exception for circumstances in which the patient's health is in danger, a decision affirmed last year by the U.S. Supreme Court. The House voted overwhelmingly to repeal the unconstitutional statute. In that particular roll call, as well as the numerous procedural votes that preceded it, Rep. Bedrick voted in favor of maintaining the notification requirement. Could a legislature possibly be more paternalistic than by interfering in family relationships like that?
Saturday, April 07, 2007
Outside the Co-op, With an Item I Didn't Pay For
Earlier this year, the president of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society went shopping at the Co-op Food Store in Lebanon, bought a cart full of groceries, and left the store with a 12-pack of Diet Cherry Coke for which he had not paid. He was not busted, there were no proceedings in Lebanon District Court and no TV news program learned of the story.
I am confessing this now to explain why I, as the president in question, was particularly interested in Jim Kenyon’s recent account of the Dartmouth professor who was arrested at the same store and charged with stealing two $30 bottles of dietary supplements. Although the professor purchased some groceries, the supplements were not among them. Those she simply took off the shelf, stuck in her purse and did not pay for before leaving.
As one who has literally been there myself – outside the Lebanon Co-op, with an item I didn’t purchase – I hope the professor succeeds in convincing the court of what her lawyer has already convinced Mr. Kenyon: that she made an honest mistake. But unlike Mr. Kenyon, I think the Co-op itself handled the situation responsibly and appropriately.
Mr. Kenyon points out that the alleged shoplifter is a 66-year-old professor at an Ivy League school, arrested by a loss prevention specialist 41 years her junior. In a previous column, Kenyon complained about a Norwich police officer who allegedly overreacted to a friendly snowball fight purely because the participants were teenagers. Not making judgments about people and their motives, based on superficial facts like their age and academic credentials, would be a good approach to the incident at the Co-op as well. But nothing requires consistency of newspaper columnists.
By contrast, the Co-op is governed by a higher authority – namely, the Statement on the Cooperative Identity adopted by the International Cooperative Alliance, which sets cooperatives apart from other kinds of businesses. Among the values enshrined in the Statement are equality and equity. This requires the Co-op to treat everyone alike, regardless of whether Jim Kenyon (or anyone else) is impressed by a particular person’s demographic profile.
Alternatively, it appears to be Mr. Kenyon’s view that shoplifters should get away with warnings from the Co-op, and that by using a loss prevention specialist the organization is succumbing to a “gotcha” mentality. The facts, and the applicable principles, suggest otherwise.As my Diet Cherry Coke experience demonstrates, it is arguably too easy to take merchandise away from the Co-op without paying for it. I like to think that the Co-op can afford to be more sanguine about shoplifting than other businesses because people realize that stealing from the Co-op is equivalent to stealing from one’s neighbors. But if word got around that thieves faced nothing more from the Co-op than a stern lecture, those few no-goodniks who prey upon their neighbors would do so with impunity. If management took such an approach, it would contravene explicit instructions from the Board to protect the assets of the cooperative.
Sadly, a serious theft problem at the Lebanon store led management to use loss prevention specialists. It would be one thing if the pattern involved indigent parents taking baby food for their children, or capricious teenagers stealing whoopie pies, or even random losses suggesting the absent-mindedness Mr. Kenyon attributes to the arrested professor. In fact, what has been chronically walking out the door are luxury items like expensive bottles of wine and costly dietary supplements of precisely the sort found in the professor’s purse. The market for these items consists largely of people who can afford them, which undermines Mr. Kenyon’s theory that theft should be deemed a mistake when an obvious motive is lacking.
The Co-op nevertheless owes Jim Kenyon thanks for providing an opportunity to distinguish its way of doing things from conventional businesses. Would a typical supermarket publicly explain its approach to loss prevention? Could such a store confront, much less discuss in a newspaper, the philosophical implications of dealing with shoplifting?
And as for that Diet Cherry Coke: I’d put it on the low shelf of my shopping cart and neither I nor the cashier noticed it when I checked out. Discovering my oversight at my car, I hustled back into the store and paid up, with apologies. Was I a shoplifter?By law, the answer turns on whether I intended to steal. Concerning intent, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once famously observed that “even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.” The soda was a stumble. Whether the dietary supplements taken by the professor were a stumble or a kick is a question the court will have to decide.
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Food Co-op Claws Past Whole Foods
By Henry Darger
ASSOCATED PRESS
Sunday, April 01, 2007
HANOVER, New Hampshire — Raising the stakes for the humane treatment of lobsters sold in grocery stores, New Hampshire’s Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society has stopped selling the tasty crustaceans live and instead now provides them to customers after administering “lobster lethal injections” of either lemon juice or melted butter.
“Unlike Maine, our state has only 17 miles of seacoast – so we have to get creative when it comes to selling the fresh seafood delicacy we know our socially conscious customers crave,” said Terry Applebee, general manager of the food co-op, the nation’s second largest. Appleby was referring to the recently announced plans by the Whole Foods chain to sell electrocuted lobsters at its new Portland, Maine store in an effort to treat the animals humanely.
“Lobster electrocution was a good idea, but the only thing it accomplishes is soothing the conscience of grocery shoppers,” said Applebee. “Our innovative approach to crustacean compassion also allows guilt-free lobster consumption at the same time it adds taste and value to this excellent local product. Who doe
sn’t eat their lobster with lemon juice or melted butter?”
Working with researchers at the Salmon P. Chase food innovation laboratory at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, the Co-op experimented with various methods of dispatching the lobsters without causing them pain or discomfort. “We tried various immersion techniques as well as a noose-like contraption,” said Professor Claude Homard of the Thayer School. “Our ‘eureka’ moment came when one of the guys from the seafood counter at the Co-op’s Lebanon store said he liked to smother his lobster in melted butter.”
At first, the research team treated the suggestion as a joke. But, to satisfy their curiousity, the inquired of anesthesiologists at the nearby Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Despite the strident opposition of the American Society of Anesthesiologists to lethal injections for humans on death row, the doctors observed the process in its experimental phase and advised that infusions of butter and/or lemon juice result in a quick and painless death to lobsters.
A local animal rights organization, Civil Rights for Animals and Plants, remains skeptical. “Lobsters deserve death with dignity, and we shouldn’t do to defenseless animals what we wouldn’t even do to a serial killer of people,” said Shelley Croydon, the group’s spokesperson. But, she added, “this is definitely an improvement over death by boiling or that awful lobster electric chair Whole Foods uses.”
The Co-op, which markets the innovative product as “Live Free or Die” lobsters in tribute to the New Hampshire state motto, reports that its latest effort at socially conscious marketing has proven wildly popular with customers. Some 500 lobsters a week are making the ultimate sacrifice, painlessly, at the co-op’s two supermarkets. The $62 million-a-year consumer-owned retailer even has an “Eighth Amendment Seafood Cookbook” in the works for publication this summer.
“Now our biggest problem is adequate supply, since we want our lobsters to come from the New Hampshire seacoast,” said Tony White, the co-op’s merchandising manager. “So we’re looking at investing in underwater lobster-farming facilities as a way of diversifying our business and meeting the growing retail demand.”
With such a tiny seacoast, New Hampshire has scant submerged real estate available for such purposes in territorial waters. According to White, the Co-op has been in merger discussions with the Clamshell Consortium, a fishermen’s cooperative that is one of New England’s major suppliers of farm-grown clams and mussels. Clamshell holds a longterm lease on 400 acres of prime aquaculture seabed off the coast of Seabrook, N.H. The state’s Department of Resources and Economic Development believes the site could accommodate up to 3,500 lobster traps without adversely affecting the mollusk farming there.
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ASSOCATED PRESS
Sunday, April 01, 2007
HANOVER, New Hampshire — Raising the stakes for the humane treatment of lobsters sold in grocery stores, New Hampshire’s Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society has stopped selling the tasty crustaceans live and instead now provides them to customers after administering “lobster lethal injections” of either lemon juice or melted butter.
“Unlike Maine, our state has only 17 miles of seacoast – so we have to get creative when it comes to selling the fresh seafood delicacy we know our socially conscious customers crave,” said Terry Applebee, general manager of the food co-op, the nation’s second largest. Appleby was referring to the recently announced plans by the Whole Foods chain to sell electrocuted lobsters at its new Portland, Maine store in an effort to treat the animals humanely.
“Lobster electrocution was a good idea, but the only thing it accomplishes is soothing the conscience of grocery shoppers,” said Applebee. “Our innovative approach to crustacean compassion also allows guilt-free lobster consumption at the same time it adds taste and value to this excellent local product. Who doe
sn’t eat their lobster with lemon juice or melted butter?”Working with researchers at the Salmon P. Chase food innovation laboratory at Dartmouth College’s Thayer School of Engineering, the Co-op experimented with various methods of dispatching the lobsters without causing them pain or discomfort. “We tried various immersion techniques as well as a noose-like contraption,” said Professor Claude Homard of the Thayer School. “Our ‘eureka’ moment came when one of the guys from the seafood counter at the Co-op’s Lebanon store said he liked to smother his lobster in melted butter.”
At first, the research team treated the suggestion as a joke. But, to satisfy their curiousity, the inquired of anesthesiologists at the nearby Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Despite the strident opposition of the American Society of Anesthesiologists to lethal injections for humans on death row, the doctors observed the process in its experimental phase and advised that infusions of butter and/or lemon juice result in a quick and painless death to lobsters.
A local animal rights organization, Civil Rights for Animals and Plants, remains skeptical. “Lobsters deserve death with dignity, and we shouldn’t do to defenseless animals what we wouldn’t even do to a serial killer of people,” said Shelley Croydon, the group’s spokesperson. But, she added, “this is definitely an improvement over death by boiling or that awful lobster electric chair Whole Foods uses.”
The Co-op, which markets the innovative product as “Live Free or Die” lobsters in tribute to the New Hampshire state motto, reports that its latest effort at socially conscious marketing has proven wildly popular with customers. Some 500 lobsters a week are making the ultimate sacrifice, painlessly, at the co-op’s two supermarkets. The $62 million-a-year consumer-owned retailer even has an “Eighth Amendment Seafood Cookbook” in the works for publication this summer.
“Now our biggest problem is adequate supply, since we want our lobsters to come from the New Hampshire seacoast,” said Tony White, the co-op’s merchandising manager. “So we’re looking at investing in underwater lobster-farming facilities as a way of diversifying our business and meeting the growing retail demand.”
With such a tiny seacoast, New Hampshire has scant submerged real estate available for such purposes in territorial waters. According to White, the Co-op has been in merger discussions with the Clamshell Consortium, a fishermen’s cooperative that is one of New England’s major suppliers of farm-grown clams and mussels. Clamshell holds a longterm lease on 400 acres of prime aquaculture seabed off the coast of Seabrook, N.H. The state’s Department of Resources and Economic Development believes the site could accommodate up to 3,500 lobster traps without adversely affecting the mollusk farming there.
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